by Simon Jones | Nov 6, 2018 | Business Strategy, Business Website Help, Marketing Online
Business owners can no longer ignore the need to have a user-friendly, optimised website, and quality content – at least, not if they want to convert website visitors into customers and remain competitive. Yet every year we hear about startups failing to gain traction despite an innovative product and strong financial backing. And major corporations aren’t immune either. After failing to leverage the power of e-commerce in its early days, it was only last year that stuttering Toys ‘R’ Us announced a plan to revamp its website – part of a $100 million e-commerce strategy. But you might remember how that panned out. For many businesses, the website is often the first interaction a prospective client has with the brand. And it doesn’t matter what you sell – B2B or B2C, products or services – your ultimate goal is to convert the ‘potentials’ visiting your website into customers. If you aren’t converting visitors into customers, or views to sales, asking why should be a priority. Could it be something as simple as… You’re attracting (or targeting) the wrong audience This could be for any number of reasons. Does your website address issues more likely to interest small business, when your ideal clients are medium and large businesses? Are you building a young Instagram and Snapchat audience when your offering is more attractive to baby boomers? Setting up Google Analytics properly can provide valuable insights on your website visitors – their age, location, how they found your site, how long they stayed, the number of pages they visited. From there you can tweak your content or reconsider publishing platforms to...
by Tess Oliver | Feb 27, 2017 | Business Website Help, Content Marketing, Marketing Online, Small Business
There’s now a plethora of online tools out there that can make running your business and your content marketing and promotion efforts so much easier. Best of all, many of these offer free versions, or free trials on their paid options. They can be very handy for businesses without the budget to outsource to a content marketing agency. In pre-internet days, content marketing was often an expensive exercise, involving printed brochures and catalogues, direct selling, or TV, radio and print advertising. It was also largely hard to measure, which meant it could be very hit-and-miss. American department store pioneer John Wanamaker, who is credited with printing the first copyright store advertisement in 1874, is famously quoted as saying that half of his advertising spend was wasted, but he wasn’t sure which half! Some of the tools we’ve singled out not only make content marketing easier and cheaper, but infinitely more measurable, so you can avoid wasting time, money and effort on content strategies that aren’t working. Read on to find out more about 10 free tools you should consider using in your business. GoSpaces – free e-commerce website building Shopify’s GoSpaces app enables fledgling e-commerce businesses to build an online store for free. Once you join up, you are provided with a generic website template which you can alter to suit your business by adding your own content, images, and products. The platform also comes with multilingual (up to 20 languages) and multi-currency support, and a shopping cart support service. It is free to set up and use until you reach sales of $50 per month, after which there...
by Leonie Seysan | Jan 3, 2017 | Blog Writing, Business Strategy, Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Online
Heading into the New Year with a resolution to step up your marketing efforts? If you didn’t get the results you wanted in 2016, here’s a quick checklist you can use to identify weak spots in your content marketing. Assuming you’ve made some effort to publish content during 2016, here are the four top mistakes we see that diminish the results: 1. Putting Little Effort into Content Creation With so much content online, if you’re not making a big effort to create content that hits home with your audience, you might be wasting your time creating content at all. Short shallow articles that state the obvious won’t hold audience attention even if a catchy headline entices people to click through to read it. And what’s the point of attracting visitors to your website or LinkedIn article if they’re going to roll their eyes and click the back button? The bad news: good content takes time and effort to create. The good news: even one or two excellent articles a month, properly promoted on social channels, can increase your audience, and help you connect with prospective clients. If your team can’t devote the time, there are content writing services who will be happy to help! 2. Failing to promote content on social media Many business owners believe that simply publishing regularly on their blog will drive additional traffic to their websites and deliver extra business. If you undertake your keyword research and publish well optimised posts, you might indeed garner some extra traffic to your website. But you’ll bring in more if you’re drawing people’s attention to your content via social...
by Leonie Seysan | Oct 26, 2016 | Business Strategy, Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Online
So, you’ve developed a content marketing strategy your competitors would envy, but will you be able to carry it out? Creating a content strategy or an inbound marketing plan will provide a solid direction, but it’s what comes next – planning your content – that will determine how well you implement. If you don’t have a comprehensive plan, don’t jump in an attempt immediate implementation. Your strategy is only the what and why. Now you’ll need to plan the who and how. It’s this planning phase that will allow you to streamline your activities for the best chance of consistent implementation. Perhaps your strategy involves: Researching to ensure you choose topics of greatest interest to your buyer personas Publishing high quality content consistently Optimising your content for discoverability Being highly active on the social media channels most relevant to you Curating outstanding content your audience will appreciate Regularly repurposing your own content assets into eBooks or other material Here is a breakdown of some of the tasks involved to help you decide on the who and how for your content plan. Topic and keyword research – taking the time to undertake keyword research not only helps you identify popular search terms and long tail keywords with potential, it helps to identify the type of information your prospective clients are looking for. The person most suitable for this task might be your content strategist, or any other team member from a writer to a marketing assistant who has a thorough understanding of your audience, and familiarity with the tools used to undertake keyword research. Writing – there are several potential solutions for...
by Leonie Seysan | Sep 28, 2016 | Business Strategy, Content Marketing, Marketing Online, Small Business
If there’s one topic every B2B enterprise owner or marketing manager is interested in, it’s lead generation. In this post I’m going to do something pretty odd for someone who runs a content writing business – I’m going to explain why, for B2B lead generation, content often isn’t king. Event marketing is. Content and social media will still be part of the lead generation equation for most B2Bs, but having given this topic a lot of thought this week, I’ve come to the conclusion that many B2Bs (myself included) have become overly focussed on online lead gen, and might be better served by making event marketing the key plank in their strategy. A recent personal observation really clinched this for me. I’ve been thinking lately of putting together my own workshops, so I went along to one I knew had been run multiple times to see what I could learn from the presentation and approach. It was by no means the liveliest workshop I’ve ever been to, but I have no doubt it works a treat. Free personal consultations were offered at the very end, and it seemed that about 50% of attendees were ready and waiting to take up the offer. Yes, they were taking the next step in the ‘buyer journey’ – in droves. Of course, not all of those enthusiastic attendees will progress from the free consultation to a paid service, but I’m guessing there’s a pretty decent conversion rate and an excellent ROI. If 20 people attend a free personal consultation, and the conversion rate is only 25%, that’s still 5 new customers – and...
by Leonie Seysan | Sep 15, 2016 | Content Marketing, Marketing Online, Uncategorized
I can safely say that more than a few digital marketing agencies regularly lose clients over poor quality content. That’s because many people who enquire about our content marketing services do so the moment they reach the end of a digital marketing agency contract – when they’ve made a decision not to renew because of a content issue. Often, they’ve encountered the problem early on in the contract, but when their complaints didn’t result in any significant improvement, they stopped complaining and quietly awaited the contract expiry date. To be clear, there are some digital agencies that do an excellent job in this space. But why do many others have such a problem supplying good content? For a few, it’s because they’re short-sighted and not even trying. Many others seem to have the will but not the way – they want to keep clients happy but can’t seem to stem the flow of complaints about content. Where agency attitude and culture are right but the content is falling short of client expectations, I believe it comes down to the not having the right processes and team members in place for properly managing content creation. Agencies that began in traditional marketing and added digital marketing or content marketing services seem to have far less trouble that those that began with a focus on SEO and PPC management. That’s likely to be because traditional marketing agencies are accustomed to the processes necessary to manage creative work, so if they add a content or blog writing service for their clients, they tend to apply similar processes. The challenge for those traditional marketing...
